Telepathy
Nobody trusts a telepath. It's true. Everyone, especially at a CCS facility, has secrets they will jealously guard, that many would injure for, and some would kill for. Risk of injury or death is higher among inmates when telepathy is involved. Be mindful of your telepaths! Only interact with them through automaton proxies. We tell you this for your own good. Reading Telepaths can read the thoughts of anything with a living human brain, as well as sapient necrotypes (under most conditions), hemophages, and under special conditions, psychic shades. This system is fairly straightforward. Telepaths can read a target within POW feet. Range can be extended by reducing magnitude, as normal, along the normal scale of 1x, 2x, 5x, 10x, 20x, 50x, 100x, and so on. Reading in an area beyond simply gauging a crowd's emotional state is usually overwhelming; only the most foolish or confident telepaths tend to do so. *Magnitude 1 - polygraphy. Even the most untrained telepath can read an individual's emotional state and gauge with a good degree of accuracy whether they believe what they are saying is the truth. *Magnitude 2 - surface thoughts. Extremely useful during interrogations, Psi-Corps will often have telepaths trained in conventional debate lead a topic toward causing a mark to think about what they are trying to hide. *Magnitude 3 - surface memories. The telepath can read the shallowest of a subject's memories, usually about recent events or personal history that they consider often. There is no filter for memory accuracy here, and telepaths can read false information from this if someone has been thoroughly gaslit or brainwashed. Adept telepathic writers can transmit incredibly convincing information to someone scanning for surface memories, as well. *Magnitude 4 - profiling. Telepaths can deep-read individuals' thought processes to develop a very good sense of that individual's overall personality in an instant, and with some training are able to construct very accurate psychological profiles of them from that information. *Magnitude 5 - deep reading. This takes a great deal of time, usually around an hour; the telepath delves into absolutely every memory the subject has. Pairing this with Writing, a telepath can rewrite a person's entire history with time. Every reading directly touches the mind of another. There is, thus, a risk of confusion or psychic backlash; with the more disparate the reader and subjects' SAN scores are, the greater a risk of disorientation or sanity damage. Writing Telepaths can also command the thoughts of anything with a living human brain, as well as sapient necrotypes (under most conditions), hemophages, and under special conditions, psychic shades. This system is fairly straightforward. Telepaths can write a target within POW feet. Range can be extended by reducing magnitude, as normal, along the normal scale of 1x, 2x, 5x, 10x, 20x, 50x, 100x, and so on. Writing in an area beyond simply instructing a single command is incredibly taxing to most telepaths. Writing is subject to a contest of POW between the writer and subject; affecting augmented individuals is simultaneously easier and more difficult - while augments have lower POW scores, and full conversions have no POW score whatsoever, cranial augmentation technology and any data interfacing between man and machine create difficulty for telepaths to write commands to a subject. Consider a mildly augmented character to be POW 11 (or, average their actual POW with 11, if it is higher), and each step after that toward full conversion add 1 to their POW. A full conversion character is thus effectively POW 16 - difficult, but possible, to influence. *Magnitude 1 - simple, single-word commands. Stop, bow, come, relax, sleep. *Magnitude 2 - influence perception. This is easiest as a simple distorting of the environment, keeping details close but changing them so as to make them notably different. A telepath can mask their presence from an individual, or create a convincing representation of something with a higher effective magnitude. For more thorough illusions of this nature, one subject can be concealed or illusion conveyed with each step of magnitude above 2. This power can also be used to cause a target to forget something that has just happened - but only just. Never trust a telepath. *Magnitude 3 - programming. This can be either a more complex command, such as 'walk across the room and enter your password into the terminal', or a triggered command, such as 'if a man in red arrives, shoot.' Individuals are typically ignorant of programming until a conditional command is triggered. A telepath can embed one additional conditional command in a single target per step of magnitude above 3. Never trust a telepath. '' *Magnitude 4 - injection. More insidious than programming, the writer is - in this case - able to inject a desire, interest, or habit into an individual. This can be used to influence an individual's tastes, to create an intense desire for the friendship or companionship of an individual. At this point, with a half-TP% roll, a psychic can directly possess an individual briefly. ''Never trust a telepath. *Magnitude 5 - memory alteration. A psychic can, if they are feeling terribly cruel, erase a person's entire history with this power. More commonly, they rewrite a subject's perception of events, usually fine-tuning an individual's recent memories, sometimes their history. Never trust a telepath. Category:About Category:Psionics